Google now brings in 25% of all North American internet traffic

Recent data from analytics firm Deepfield has Google serving up a massive 25% of all North American internet traffic. While it isn't surprising Google sits atop this list, the growth it has accumulated over the past few years is. Up substantially from just three years ago when the tech giant accounted for about 6%, Google is significantly ahead of its nearest competitors and now clocks in at more than Facebook, Instagram and Netflix combined.

Deepfield shows that 60% of all internet devices connect with Google at least once on a daily basis. Such devices include computers and mobile devices, hundreds of game consoles as well as other embeddable and home media devices. This number would be even larger if it were only accounting for computers and mobile devices.

"While big data center construction projects and Google Fiber have dominated the headlines, far less attention has focused on Google’s growing and pervasive dominance throughout the underlying Internet infrastructure and economy. For example, Google analytics, hosting, and advertising play some type of role in over half of all large web services or sites today based on our ongoing study…"

Deepfield, at least partly, connects the growth with the deployment of Google Global cache servers coming to new North American internet providers, something the company noticed were mostly outside of the region during its 2010 study. Three years back, there were just a small amount of these in NA and today they're in almost 80% of North American ISPs. These servers store the most used and popular content and then serve it directly from the internet provider's hub, rather than taking the long route all the way from Google's main data center. This is something other companies make use of as well and a tactic Netflix has been using for over a year now.

Deepfield says that it feels Google and Netflix's move to this kind of direct relationship with ISPs will be something other tech giants like Apple and Facebook will likely look in to in the future, if they aren't already.

Data from the Deepfield study is derived from anonymized info from "both browsers as well as all embedded devices (e.g. Apple TV, Roku, Xbox 360, mobile apps, etc.)." The company says this is the "largest ongoing study of its kind covering roughly 1/5 of the US consumer Internet."